The University of California Santa Barbara offers students and scholars an opportunity to live and learn in a stunning setting on the shores of the Pacific. The Santa Barbara area's natural beauty and mild climate provide almost unlimited opportunities for year-round outdoor activities including hiking, camping, scuba diving, surfing, hang-gliding, mountain biking, sailing and windsurfing. The City of Santa Barbara offers excellent cultural amenities including internationally recognized performances of theater, music, dance and other performing arts, art galleries and numerous festivals.

The campus's character, physical beauty and location near a historic city with a diverse cultural life and commitment to preserving the environment all provide the setting for an academic community known internationally for its excellence and innovation. A member of the Association of American Universities, this vibrant, energetic campus ranks with Harvard, Stanford and UC Berkeley among the leading institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and Canada. Students know it as a friendly, welcoming place where their professors take the time to help them learn. The quality of faculty members testifies to the strength of UCSB's academic programs and the quantity and quality of its research.

One of the ten campuses of the University of California, UC Santa Barbara's academic community consists of ~20,000 undergraduates, ~3000 graduate students, and ~1000 faculty members. The campus's five colleges-the College of Letters & Science, the College of Engineering, the College of Creative Studies, the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, and the the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education-offer nearly eighty undergraduate majors and over thirty minors in addition to more than fifty graduate-level programs